Readers' comments

I believe the claim of a six month offer is apocryphal. The prosecutors are engaged in a bit of revisionist history, trying to now claim that they would not have asked for a long jail sentence if Swartz had been convicted at trial. Laughable.

"A more sensible idea would be to require the state to provide the defence with all its evidence—particularly any exculpatory evidence—during the plea process, rather than simply during or before trial."

Yes... this was a good article until its conclusion. The author should read Rule 16 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Discovery is fairly open in federal court, and prosecutors have a duty to provide all material evidence to the defense upon request.

There are major problems with mandatory minimums -- but the discovery procedure, at least in federal court, is not what's causing the problems.

The mills of the law grind slowly but exceeding fine.
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That generally has been taken to mean that justice, given time, will prevail; but nowadays it can just as well mean that, once in the mill, whether you have really done anything wrong or not, you will be ground into dust.

The Economist should call out US Attorney Carmen Ortiz for her overly zealous prosecution of Aaron Swartz. Many of his friends and associates believe that he would still be with us today if it weren't for the harassment, threats, and merciless persecution of Ms. Ortiz, of which the 35-year sentence is only a part.

Imagine for a minute that someone in Congress proposed a law that would place a major industry off the books and totally outside the law. Say it is an industry that employs more than 1% of the population and is patronized by more than 25%. Abandoned tax revenue would be in the tens of billions a year, or more. Neither the employees nor their employers would pay any taxes. Nor would there be any taxes on the product, or many of the supplies. Under the new law there would be no purity, safety, labeling or even packaging standards for the products. New products could be marketed at any time with no oversight. Teenagers and even children would be recruited as customers and salesmen. There would be no safety standards for the employees, no pensions, no vacations, no sick pay, no health care, no collective bargaining. The products could be made anywhere including residential locations in unsupervised factories that pollute, poison and often explode or burn down. Employers could fire, physically punish or kill employees at will, but pay themselves huge bonuses and collect unimaginable perquisites. Dissatisfied employees would have no recourse, except violence. Since the industry officially would not exist, all traffic would be covert i.e., smuggled. Who is better at smuggling than international organized crime: the CIA, al-Qaeda, the Taliban perhaps? Competitors, denied due process would settle disputes by violence creating a feudal secondary government with large armies and a black market for military weapons, equally unregulated.

Would anyone vote for such a bill?

To further complicate the matter assume that while the industry is totally unregulated contact with the products (direct or implied) will be a crime that has severe penalties. With the industry underground, enforcement would be random. Overzealous enforcers would cram the prisons with mostly harmless people (including your children, people you know, love and depend on) costing more billions. Prisons become crime universities. Your natural rights as a human being will be subordinated to the enforcement effort. Your property could be seized on mere suspicion.

Would anyone vote for that now?

Surprise, Congress has already passed it, bit by bit and it’s known collectively as the War On Drugs and it has been being lost for over 100 years.

Good luck convincing anyone to be prosecutor. Do you realize the amount of litigation that would open them up to? A convict sitting around in a jail has nothing better to do than to antagonize the prosecutor who put he or she there.

In 1943 while working at Los Almos on the atomic bomb, Richard Feynman committed far more serious hacking offenses than Aaron Swartz ever did. He cracked the safes of fellow nuclear scientists which held secrets to the atomic bomb. If the American government did to Richard Feynman (who also suffered from depression later in life) what they did to Aaron Swartz a lot of the most foundational and unbelievably creative work in quantum electrodynamics would never have been done. Feynman also became interested in management science after his work on the space shuttle challenger disaster, stating if he had to do it all again he would study management science. Aaron Swartz was not only tremendously clever, but he also had Feynman's ability to be disarmingly simple. For example here is Swartz's argument (released by Tim O'Reilly) AGAINST transparency and his brilliantly simple and "obvious" alternative:http://img837.imageshack.us/img837/737/transparencyaaronswartz.png
(pdf:) http://www.scribd.com/doc/122016234/When-is-Transparency-Usefull
Keep in mind George Soros has spent billions on government transparency projects.

Thanks for posting the selection. But Swartz lost credibility for me with the line, "Let's decide that our job is to fight for good in the world." That phrase has been done to death by every Utopian thinker who ever lived. It's never worked, and has been used to justify everything from the Crusades to genocide. Think of the Communist Manifesto, one of the most Utopian documents ever written. Then remember how Communism worked in practice.

Any sentence beginning with "Lets" is suspicious, especially for anyone who has worked with groups of people of any size. "Let's all mow the lawn," assures that not a single blade will be trimmed. "Let's all invent QED," would have accomplished nothing. One brilliant thinker with safe-cracking skills created QED.

It's like that with most great inventions, breakthroughs and movements. You need a gifted leader to lay out the plans and win over enough people to make it happen. The individual is key. Swartz may have developed into that kind of leader; it's a shame that the government's obsession put an end to his development.